


We Are The Foxes (the ugliest prey remix)

by MilesHibernus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, HYDRA Trash Party, M/M, Rape Aftermath, hurt but not much comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 17:52:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6817954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MilesHibernus/pseuds/MilesHibernus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve finds Bucky's apartment in Bucharest.  Someone else found it first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are The Foxes (the ugliest prey remix)

**Author's Note:**

> This is Steve's POV of "[for i am the ugliest prey](http://hydratrashmeme.dreamwidth.org/1801.html?thread=4055817#cmt4055817)", posted to the Hydra Trash Party on Dreamwidth. You can read this without that one, but you'll get better context if you go there first.

Steve doesn't know what he expected.  
  
Well, that's not entirely true. The building isn't ritzy, the neighborhood isn't great; Steve knows this kind of place because he spent the first 25 years of his life living in one. He expected small rooms, dodgy heating, dirty paint and faded floorboards, and he got that. What he didn't expect...  
  
What he didn't expect was to be able to smell blood and sweat and come from the hallway. What he didn't expect was for the door to be unlocked. What he didn't expect was a room ripped to shreds, mattress stuffing and tatters of paper and fabric littering the floor (which has a hole in it) like confetti in the streets on New Year's Day. What he didn't expect was Bucky, handcuffed to the radiator, listing to the left under the dead weight of his metal arm, naked except for the remnants of a blue shirt and a pair of boxer shorts shoved down below his knees, kneeling in a huddle that he barely looks up from when Steve freezes in the doorway.

Steve knows what this was.  You couldn't grow up in their neighborhood and not know.  
  
"Buck, what..." Steve starts, but his voice breaks and he has to clear his throat. "Bucky. Buck, do you remember me?"  
  
Which is possibly the stupidest thing he could be asking right now, but he needs to know—not that it matters, because Bucky doesn't answer. He doesn't even turn to look in Steve's direction. Steve shakes himself and recovers enough to step inside and close the door behind him. In his ear, Sam says, "What's up, Cap?"  
  
"I'm gonna stop transmitting," Steve says quietly. "Tell me if there's any movement."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Just give me a minute, Sam," Steve says, and clicks the switch that turns off voice-activation on the comm.  
  
"Steve?" says Sam, and then, "I hope you know what you're doing."  
  
Meanwhile Steve's looking around. The place is literally two rooms, and the bathroom's small enough to count only by courtesy of having a wall between it and the rest of the apartment. He'd be able to hear it if anyone were in there, or behind the small high door that has to hide a cupboard. Steve takes a breath. "Bucky, I need you to tell me if you're OK. If you know me. Bucky, can you hear me?"  
  
Nothing. Steve sees the glint of Bucky's eyes, but he doesn't so much as blink out of rhythm. He's shivering, a fine, subtle tremor. Maybe he's drugged? But what could work on _them_? "OK, Buck, I'm gonna come over there, OK? It's just me. It's Steve. I'm just gonna come over and help." He takes a step in Bucky's direction and Bucky flinches.  
  
Bucky _flinches_. The last time Steve saw him he was beating him to death, and now he's scared, and Steve's heart contracts in his chest in a way he hasn't felt since 1943. But he keeps moving, because Bucky needs help. The air smells like sex and blood and Steve doubts it's helping his reaction at all, but there's nothing for it.  
  
It doesn't take many steps to cross the room, and Steve crouches, trying to look Bucky in the eye, but Bucky's staring at the floor and won't look up. And now that Steve can get a better view, Bucky's mouth is full of...paper? Scraps of paper, most of it written on. Steve sees one word, in Bucky's perfect Palmer script; it says _rusted_. Steve's hand tightens, and only then does he become aware that it's resting on Bucky's knee. "Bucky," he says, louder than he should, and Bucky sways like he wants to move away and is afraid to. A whine, quickly cut off, forces its way around the paper. Steve snatches his hand back, but the paper at least is a problem he can fix.  
  
Gently he braces Bucky's head with one hand, and with the other starts scooping the spit-wet shreds from Bucky's mouth, murmuring words he hopes are reassuring. Bucky still isn't reacting and Steve's terrified of what that might mean, but he doesn't get any more bad sounds so he persists until an overenthusiastic finger gets too close to the back of Bucky's mouth and he gags. "Don't," he says, his voice as thready as his pulse, rough and hitching. "I, I can—I can—" He pauses, spits another shred. Steve decides that that'll do; if Bucky's mouth is clear enough to talk, Steve isn't going to...  
  
Steve isn't going to put anything else into Bucky's mouth, is what he settles on, because that way he can keep his voice and hands gentle and not go looking for anyone to _kill_. "You don't have to do anything, Buck, just let me get you loose, huh?" Steve says. The handcuffs aren't especially sturdy; as far as he can tell they're standard law-enforcement types, and he can snap the chain with one hand. Bucky could have too, even with his metal arm out of commission, Steve is pretty sure, and the thought just ratchets his anxiety up another notch. He pries the little blinking device away from Bucky's metal biceps and smashes it neatly under the edge of the shield.  
  
And Bucky curls up, wrapping both his arms across his stomach. Steve leans toward him, trying to offer support, but Bucky's still holding himself up. "Hey," Steve says quietly, hoping that the tension doesn't show. "Buck, it's...it's over. Hey. It's all over now." Bucky still doesn't look up. Steve sets his hands carefully on Bucky's upper arms. Through his gloves they don't feel very different, metal versus flesh. "They're gone. Let's—let's get you cleaned up, OK?" he says helplessly.  
  
Finally, finally, Bucky reacts, nodding. He slumps, letting Steve take his weight, and for a second Steve just holds him. Then he shifts them onto one of the undamaged part of the mattress and looks for something, anything to cover Bucky with.  
  
There's the remains of a sleeping bag. The fabric seems relatively clean. Steve picks up the largest piece and wraps it around Bucky's shoulders. "Hold on, Bucky, I'm gonna get you a clean cloth," Steve says. Bucky nods again, still staring at the floor, and Steve goes into the bathroom.  
  
While he's waiting for the tapwater to warm up, Steve clicks his comm back on. "Sam, anything?" he asks.  
  
"Not so far," Sam says promptly. "What the hell's going on in there?"  
  
"Bucky," Steve says, and grinds to a halt. He doesn't know how much he can stand to say.  "He's here. And...well, the good news is that...he can't have been in Vienna any time in the last day, not in the shape he's in."  
  
"Is he OK?" Sam asks, his voice full of surprised alarm. Steve's drawing a breath to answer when Sam's tone sharpens and he says, "Oh, shit. Cap, we've got incoming."  
  
Steve straightens and turns away from the sink, still clutching the wet washrag. Bucky's picked his head up, at last, but he still won't meet Steve's eyes, and Steve takes the long stride necessary to get within arm's reach again. "Buck, do you remember me?" Steve asks.  
  
"I read about you in the museum," Bucky mumbles. Steve wipes off his face, quickly, and offers him the rag, but Bucky doesn't try to take it.  
  
The thing is, Steve's a bad liar, but Bucky could never lie to Steve.  "I know you know me," he says, as calmly as he can. "We need to get out of here, right now.  People were killed, Bucky."  
  
"I don't," Bucky says, and then visibly starts over. "I don't do that kind of thing anymore."  By the end of the sentence he sounds almost normal, the terrifying blankness dropping away, and Steve—Steve has seen this before.  He saw it in the woods outside the Austrian base, when they met up with the other escaped prisoners.  But this time Bucky isn't grinning and telling people they're not getting out of bets that easy.  
  
"Here," Steve says, pressing the rag into Bucky's hand, which closes on it in a reflexive way that makes Steve's heart hurt. "Clean up, get dressed, because the men who think you did are coming right now and they're not planning to take you alive."  
  
Bucky's mouth draws into something that might someday be a smile, and he says, "I don't have to be clean to fight." He drops the rag onto the floor and gets to his feet. Steve has a perfect view of the backs of his thighs, streaked with blood and substances Steve refuses to identify, as he opens the door to the tiny closet.  
  
Inside, folded with painful neatness on the shallow shelf, is one pair of dark bluejeans, one black t-shirt, and one dark red henley. Bucky hikes up his shorts and slides into the jeans. Steve casts around for shoes and finds them in the form of heavy boots, tumbled in the corner under one of the scraps of the sleeping bag. As Bucky pulls the red shirt over his head Steve tosses the boots over, saying, "This doesn't have to end in a fight, Buck."  There's a canvas jacket too but it's ruined, slashed to ribbons, and Steve leaves it where it lies.  
  
Bucky says calmly, "It always ends in a fight."  
  
"They're on the roof, I'm compromised," Sam says.  
  
"We have to get moving," Steve says. "Bucky—"  
  
"Don't follow me, Steve," Bucky says, stamping his bare foot into one boot.  
  
"Buck, let me help," Steve says, aware that his voice is slipping into pleading.  
  
"Five seconds," says Sam.  
  
"I'm not gonna kill anyone," Bucky says, like he's making a promise, bending to tie his laces with no evidence of discomfort in his movements.  
  
"Three seconds!"  
  
Bucky ties his second boot in a hasty knot and straightens, just as the first blow hits the apartment door with a thud. Steve turns to it, raising his shield.  
  
*  
  
Later, staring through the plexiglass of the tiny mobile prison at Bucky's blank face, all Steve can think is that Bucky never got a chance to wash.


End file.
